BIG PHYSICS, BIG QUESTIONS –

Exhibition seeks to put utopia in its place

Visitors to Paths to Utopia are invited to explore new ways of living, but utopias have always been an impossible dream, says Philip Ball

A mock-up of the anarchist utopia created by SF writer Ursula Le Guin. Bruce Atherton and Jana Chiellino, all rights reserved 2016.

Atherton-Chiellino | Copyright: King’s College London

By Philip Ball

Paths to Utopia runs until 2 October, curated by King’s College London at Somerset House

ON AN island off the coast of the New World – then still a place remote and enticing – sat an ideal city state called Utopia, the fictional creation of English statesman and philosopher Thomas More in 1516.

Inspired by Plato’s Republic (c.380 BC), More was interested in devising the perfect state: one without conflict, corruption or hardship. His Utopia is a highly structured society with mayors, councils, district controllers and slaves. Its citizens work six hours a day, and spend most of their free time on self-improvement.

As a quasi-socialist system (apart from the slavery), it won accolades from Marx, Engels and Lenin. By then, however, utopia had come to mean different things for different people. The 19th-century Russian radical Mikhail Bakunin – central to Tom Stoppard’s 2002 play trilogy The Coast of Utopia – appropriated utopian imagery to express his vision of collective anarchism.

“These early utopias are also stiflingly conformist and sound more creepy and cultish than idyllic today“

Revolutionary libertarianism would scarcely have appealed to More’s hierarchical Tudor society – Reformation radicals in Münster tried something like it in the 1530s, and it ended badly. All the same, a sense of optimistic freedom characterises the way most of us think about utopia today, and certainly informs the Paths to Utopia exhibition now running in London. Part of a year-long programme of events called Utopia 2016, it marks the 500th anniversary of the publication of More’s foundational account.

Wish you were here: Thomas More’s Utopia was sited in the New World

Collection privee, Migny/ Kharbine-Tapabor

The organisers say the events, talks and exhibition create “a space of possibility, participation and imagination… where positive visions are nurtured, supported and celebrated, and where anything is possible”.

The collection of installations is tucked away in a corner of Somerset House operated by King’s College London. Here you can watch quasi-Attenborough footage of whales in We Account the Whale Immortal by Jessica Sarah Rinland, Edward Sugden and Philip Hoare. You can sit in what looks like a cross between a cafe and a nursery school to see a video about the anarchist planet Anarres by Onkar Kular, Noam Toran, Simon Coffey and Martin Edwardes. Or you can explore the occult monochrome wall art of In Our Hands by Richard Howells and Le Gun Collective. Since utopia has come to mean pretty much whatever we want it to, it’s neither surprising nor cause for complaint that this is something of a random assortment. You might come away thinking you have seen some interesting things but wondering what it was all about and why it was utopian.

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It was important for the early utopias that they were far away – unaffected by the depredations of European society, and less apt to be read as criticism of its monarchs and priests. More cast his account of Utopia as a description given to him by a traveller, Raphael Hythlodaeus, who sailed to Utopia from Brazil. This fictional voyage set the template for several Renaissance fantasies of idealised societies, such as Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1602), Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619) and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627). They are typically humanist and progressive, aspiring to advance human potential. In Campanella’s city, people learn from childhood about the natural world from paintings on the concentric city walls. Bacon’s utopia Bensalem is run by scientist-priests who devise wondrous technologies for making artificial substances and breeding new animals and plants.

But these early utopias are also stiflingly conformist and sound more creepy and cultish than idyllic today. More’s citizens all rise and sleep at the same time, wear the same drab clothes and need permits to travel. And there is virtually no privacy – everyone is watching, so you’re forced to get on with your job. Women must kneel each month before their husbands and confess to what they did and failed to do.

You don’t have to tweak More’s Utopia very much to end up with Aldous Huxley’s dystopia in Brave New World (1932). Huxley’s technocratic dictatorship was a response to the scientific utopianism of his generation, most notably that of H. G. Wells. Huxley admitted that he set out to “pull his leg”, but Wells saw nothing funny in Brave New World, declaring it a betrayal of the future in its denial that science would be our salvation.

Worse, it was a disturbingly plausible technocracy, for Huxley took the idea of in vitro cloning of a society graded by intelligence from the speculations of his brother, the biologist Julian Huxley, and his colleague J. B. S. Haldane. Unlike George Orwell’s explicitly Stalinist dystopia 1984, Huxley’s state maintains a benign veneer, pacifying citizens with sex, drugs and “feelie” cinema. It was based as much on the US as the Soviet Union.

The need for utopias to be far away has meant that they have become mostly science-fictional today. In fact, writers began setting them on other planets almost as soon as it became clear that they were worlds like ours: Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (written around 1611), Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (written in 1628) and Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Other World: Comical history of the states and empires of the moon (published 1657) all describe the customs and traits of societies on other worlds.

In that regard, Aldous Huxley’s last novel, Island (1962), in which this genuinely utopian (but still drug-fuelled) paradise is reached by shipwreck, was something of a throwback. The fashionable way to reach utopia was now by spaceship, as in Wells’s The First Men in the moon (1901), or by time travel – Brave New World is set in 2540, while Wells’s time traveller invents a craft to take him to the future in The Time Machine (1895).

Science fiction is also an inspiration in Paths to Utopia: the Anarres installation takes its name from the planet in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), a portrayal of a failed anarchist society that was itself influenced by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (written in 1921).

Orwell suspected that We was also the inspiration for Brave New World, although Huxley denied it. Zamyatin’s novel is set in a totalitarian future in which people have numbers, not names, and live in glass buildings monitored by the secret police. It was banned by the Soviet state.

“Despite warnings they may turn dark, we still look for utopias because of the promise of a fresh start“

And yet, with its subplot about building an interstellar spaceship, We was also in the tradition of the early 20th-century Russian taste for fantasies of space travel that included authors such as Aleksey Tolstoy (a distant relative of the author of War and Peace) and Alexander Belyaev, dubbed “the Russian Jules Verne”. It was dreams of this type, not just Cold War belligerence, that fed the early Soviet space programme.

And here, surely, is a clue to why we still look for utopias – despite all the literary warnings that they may turn dark and oppressive. For they offer the promise of a fresh start. They are never places evolved from the here and now, but fantasies conjured from scratch, pristine and unsullied, out of sheer yearning. At some level we know they are an impossible dream – no more or less so than a colony on Mars.

In short, they are as magical as fairyland. And I say that not to dismiss them but to place them in their proper context. After all, the function of magic, according to the great anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, is that it “ritualises man’s optimism”. It is, he said, “the embodiment of the sublime folly of hope”. And whether utopia means “good place” or “no place”, we need to hope that it is some place.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Living in worlds that never were”